To think not looking like you parents

[DevonLodger]

Is not a good reason to take a child into care and carry out a DNA test.

I look nothing like my daughters. Should I be worried?

Apparently they gave the police a name for the girl which was different to that on her birth cert and passport, then said they had given her pet name when it was queried, hence the confusion/suspicion. Also explains the hospital not having the girl's birth recorded as it was presumably under her "official" name.

DS is 7 - he would be hugely traumatised by being placed with total strangers for three days.

That's interesting, Minty, because I would say that's a commonplace situation. My DD and sister are both known within the family by pet names not reflected on any official document. No one my sister works with, for example, would have any idea of her nickname, it's family only. So in my view, that isn't a particularly strong reason (to put it mildly) for the removal of a child.

No neither would DS MrsDV - it took a year for him to recover from staying with my mum whilst I was in hospital for a week and he saw me every day.

Mind you I guess they have more reasons than most.

But it won;t happen to me - cos I speak posh.

I think the police will fail in situations like this, no matter what they do. They had to prove one way or the other who these children belong to because as I understand it there were discrepancies in their documents.

On one hand I feel very uneasy at how easy it is for the police to rock up and take a child away. At the same time I feel it's our duty as a society to protect our children and if it means a child like Maria is found living with a family under suspect conditions then maybe it's a small price to pay.

Would you be saying that if it was your child found living with strangers?

Traumatising a small child and her family is not a small price to pay. It is not proportionate to the information they received to act in this way. None of these stories make any sense at all unless, of course, you start from a prejudiced position regarding what Roma people are like.

Sorry I think there are countless children like Maria out there. How else can they be found without the police being tipped off? And once that's happened the authorities need to prove who the child belongs to. I agree 3 days is too long for a child to be taken away from it's family. What else should the police do in a situation like this?

At the same time I feel it's our duty as a society to protect our children and if it means a child like Maria is found living with a family under suspect conditions then maybe it's a small price to pay.

Easy to say when it's neither you nor your child paying that price.

Suppose the police started randomly taking children into care whose parents couldn't immediately provide documentary evidence of their identity? For the middle-classes it's easy: they get the child's birth certificate out of the filing cabinet, present their (ninety quid) passport and it's all good. Now, back in more marginalised communities, or people engaged in custody disputes which means that they don't have the passport and birth certificate, or those that can't afford passports, or those that are just a bit shit with paperwork and don't have the birth certificate in their rented house but think it's at their own parents' but they're not sure, it all gets more complex. And the actual chances of such random investigations yielding useful results are close to zero anyway.

Prediction: the "Maria" case in Greece will not be an innocent child rent from their parents, bit will turn out to be rather more complex, with the child probably being no worse off with the family that were looking after her than she would have been with her birth parents.

Sorry I think there are countless children like Maria out there.

Seriously? Seriously? You think that in the British Isles, there are "countless" children who have been abducted and are being raised by their kidnappers? Even though there hasn't been a recorded case ever?

Would you be saying that if it was your child found living with strangers?

Has a child ever been found living with strangers in the British Isles? Is this, like, a real problem? Or is this Satanic Abuse, all over again, in which hideous over-reactions traumatise children to "deal with" a problem which never existed in the first place?

Oh FGS. My Dd doesn't look like me. But I would want the authorities to investigate if she happened to be living with a family that doesn't look like her.

Countless of children WORLDWIDE. This issue doesn't begin and end in the UK.

Let's bear in mind that none of these cases appears to concern a specific welfare concern, only an apparent lack of familial similarity.

Is that really the best focus of official action? People have spuriously referred to Baby P on here-well, wouldn't you rather attention focused on children like him already known to social services and at genuine risk than fairly well cared for children who might but might not have been the subject of informal adoption or fostering arrangements?

Maria is poor, but not necessarily mistreated (and at any rate, no more or less mistreated than her brown siblings who attracted no concern or intervention whatsoever). She ought not to be an emergency priority for police or social services given we know there are many children known to be at risk of neglect and abuse (quite a few, according to a link posted on another thread, being Roma or asylum-seeker children incarcerated, badly treated and ultimately abducted from appalling Greek detention camps). But she was.

Lamu your understanding is wrong. There were no "discrepancies" in the documents

The only reason people are assuming the documents were dodgy or contained "discrepancies" is that the family is Roma. Finding no hospital records is not proof of a discrepancy in the birth certificate/passport. It could be proof that the hospital does not have very efficient filing systems, for example?

Yes, I agree, ALL white girls with black or brown mums should be removed instantly. Because of course no non-white woman ever gave birth to a fair-skinned child.

Please see my point about it being low-level traumatic every fucking day to have to assert this in the first place...

I also think, by the way, that part of the problem with all the endless claims that there are children being kidnapped and raised by strangers is that too many people aren't willing to face up to the cold hard fact that Madeline McCann was probably dead within a few hours of her being abducted. There are a tiny, tiny number of cases of abductions by serial killers being more protracted, perhaps up to a week or so, but there is simply no evidence to support claims that there is a pattern of abductions of children then being sold into quasi-adoption or raised by their abductors.

There are endless rumours, stereotypes, "no smoke without fire" and so on, but what there isn't is cold, hard evidence that child abduction by stranger is a thing at all. Comparisons with the appalling behaviour of the Irish, Spanish, Australian, Swedish and other governments using bad laws to remove children and give them to adoptive parents, or even the shocking events of children stolen during the Dirty War in Argentina, are just not relevant: there the theft happened with the power of the state behind it, and the parents could tell themselves that it was legal, in large part because it was legal. If the claim is that children are being abducted and then raised by people seeking benefits (or whatever), before we start smashing families up to find the "victims", let's actually see whether there are any crimes to start with, eh?

Are there any social workers on this thread?

Because you might want to gird your loins at the amount of work heading your way as it seems acceptable now to remove children for 3 days pending DNA results if they don;t look like their parents.

Fosters carers should also start building extensions.

MAybe we could DNA tests paretns and children at birth then microchip them like cats so they can just be run through a scanner.

Will save loads of time.

Or we could save money by only doing it to Roma. Or maybe we should vote on which groups get to have to be chipped?

Friday, I totally agree re McCann. And wish I'd had the courage to point this out on the many threads about her.

I am not Roma (my husband is half Roma and has faced discrimination all his life) but I was also taken into care as a child for child abuse allegations (all unfounded and untrue). It was completely traumatising and I was constantly told that I was safe now etc; which confused and terrified me when all I wanted was to be with my parents. I was told I couldn't go home, and I didn't know whether it was like school and only be for a few hours,or whether it would be forever. It was very damaging for me as a child, the fear and the tension was very high and afterwards I had nightmares about having my parents taken away forever- for months after, I was very clingy and nervous about being away, in case we got separated secretly. Procedures will have changed and the child being placed in care will undoubtedly be supported a lot better, but I think to do such abig thing to a small child is completely wrong. They should have handled and dealt with it better rather than risking traumatising an innocent child, almost certainly creating more discrimination against Roma families and acting on stereotypes, assumptions and prejudice.